Whether I'm coding, writing, playing games, or pissing people off, it all boils down to pushing buttons.

September 19, 2008

Football Stuff

I'm playing two online games this football season. The first is College Pick'em, where you pick the winners of ten NCAA Saturday games and rank them according to your confidence level. The second is your standard Fantasy Football. Both of these are great fun and allow me to at least have some stake in games I otherwise wouldn't really care about.

I'm doing much better in college Pick'em this year than in years past. I'm currently in second place and only behind by one point. I've been doing a bit more research this year than in other seasons, so that's probably why I'm doing better. Up until now, it's been relatively easy to pick the winners, so everyone is pretty close in terms of score. However, this week's picks are a lot more difficult. I expect there to be a decent bit of separation after this week is over. Several of the ten games we have to pick are expected to be very close.

Fantasy football has been rather interesting. We got destroyed in our first week because we had Tom Brady as our QB, and of course he's now out for the season. We picked up Jake Delhomme, but he didn't really do anything for us in week two. Despite that, though, we managed to eek out a win, thanks mostly to Plaxico Burress, Calvin Johnson, and Marion Barber. Those guys are killer.

For this week, we dropped Delhomme and Chad Johnson (who has been nothing but dead weight) and picked up both Philip Rivers and Aaron Rodgers, who are both having great seasons so far. Hopefully they will keep it up and help us win another in week two. We're projected to lose by a few points, but I've come to notice that ESPN's points projections have two possible states: "almost dead-on" and "off by a ridiculously huge amount". Each of these states has a 50% probability of occurring for any given player.

I'm torn between whether or not to play Rivers or Rodgers. Even though Rivers is projected to have 15 points this week (seven less than Rodgers' projection), I think he will end up outperforming this estimation. He's got Chris Chambers and Vincent Jackson as targets; plus, San Diego is going up against the Jets, not exactly a powerhouse defense, while Green Bay is facing Dallas. Of course, Dallas gave up 37 points on Monday, and Green Bay's top three defense could give Rodgers a lot of time on the field. But Rivers is tied for the lead in touchdown passes this season, as well as top five in passing yards and QB rating, and Dallas' offense is killer enough to eat a lot of time off of the clock against Green Bay.

ARGH!

I may just flip a coin. Or let my wife pick. Women have that fancy intuition thingy, and she's been telling me to play Rodgers. But I can't shake this gut feeling about Rivers, either. One more day to decide...